The Book of Longings Page 8

  I went and sat beside her, hesitating before resting my hand on her arm. She faced me then, covering my hand with hers, and I saw that her right eye had disappeared into the swollen fold of her lid. Her lips were bruised purple and blue, and her jaw was puffed out as if stuffed with food. A bowl, a very fine gold one, sat beside her on the floor glinting in the shadowy light, brimming with what looked like blood and spittle. A sob rose in my throat. “Oh, Tabitha.”

  I pulled her head to my shoulder and smoothed her hair. I had nothing to offer her but my willingness to sit there while she endured her pain. “I’m here,” I murmured. When she didn’t speak, I sang her a familiar lullaby, for it was all I could think to do. “Sleep, little one, night has come. Morning is far, but I am near.” I sang it over and over, rocking her body with mine.

  When I ceased singing, she offered me a faint smile, and it was then I saw a ragged bit of cloth protruding oddly from the side of her mouth. Keeping her eyes fastened on mine, she reached up and pulled it slowly through her lips, a long bloody strip of linen. There seemed no end to it. When it was fully disgorged, she lifted the bowl and spit into it.

  I felt a wave of revulsion, but I didn’t flinch. “What has happened to your mouth?”

  She opened it so I could see inside. Her tongue, what was left of it, was a morass of raw, mutilated flesh. It writhed helpless in her mouth as she tried to form words, utterances that flailed about and made no sense. I stared at her, uncomprehending, before the truth hit me. Her tongue has been cut out. The tongue from my premonition.

  “Tabitha!” I cried. “Who did this?”

  “Faah-er. Faaaah-er.” A dribble of red ran down her chin.

  “Are you trying to say Father?”

  She grabbed my hand, nodding.

  I only remember getting to my feet, stunned and desperate. I don’t remember screaming, but the door flew open and her mother was there, shaking me, telling me to stop. I tore away from her. “Don’t lay your hands on me!”

  Rage shredded my breath. It clawed straight through my chest. “What crime did your daughter commit to cause her father to cut her tongue from her mouth? Is it a sin to stand on the street and cry out one’s anguish and beg for justice?”

  “She brought shame on her father and this house!” her mother viciously exclaimed. “Her punishment is spoken of in Scripture—‘the perverse tongue shall be cut out.’”

  “You have raped her all over again!” I ground the words slowly through my teeth.

  Once, after Father had upbraided Yaltha for her lack of meekness, she’d said to me, “Meekness. It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger.” I’d not forgotten this. I knelt beside my friend.

  The shine of the bowl caught my eye once again, and I knew what, until that moment, had been obscured. Getting to my feet, I picked up the bowl, careful not to spill the contents. I thundered at Tabitha’s mother, “Where is your husband’s study?” She frowned and did not answer. “Show me, or I will find it myself.”

  When she didn’t move, Tabitha rose from her mat and led me to a small room, while her mother followed behind shrieking at me to leave her house. His sanctum was furnished with a table, a bench, and two wooden shelves that were laden with his scribal possessions, shawls and hats, and as I suspected, the three other golden bowls stolen from Antipas’s palace.

  I looked at Tabitha. I would give her more than lullabies; I would give her my anger. I flung her blood across the walls, the table, the shawls and hats, Antipas’s bowls, the scrolls, vials of ink, and clean parchments. I went about it with calm and measure. I could not punish her rapist or give back her voice, but I could do this one act of defiance, this small revenge, and because of it her father would know his brutality had not gone unwitnessed. He would at least suffer the rebuke of my anger.

  Tabitha’s mother charged at me, but she was too late—the bowl was empty. “My husband will see you punished,” she cried. “Do you think he won’t go to your father?”

  “Tell him my father has been charged with finding the one who stole Herod Antipas’s bowls. I would be pleased to inform Father of the thief’s identity.”

  Her face slackened and the fight left her. She understood my threat. My father, I knew, would hear nothing of this.

  * * *

  • • •

  BECAUSE TABITHA HAD tried so hard to reveal what happened to her and been silenced for it, I removed the last two sheets of papyrus from the goatskin pouch beneath my bed and inscribed the story of her rape and the maiming of her tongue. Once again, I sat with my back against the door, knowing if Mother were to come seeking me, I could not prevent her from entering for long. She would push her way in and find me writing, ransack my room and find my hidden scrolls. I pictured her reading them—the words of love and want that I’d written about Jesus, the blood I’d splashed on the walls in Tabitha’s house.

  I risked everything, but I couldn’t stop myself from writing her story. I filled both papyri. Grief and anger streamed from my fingers. The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.

  xix.

  The clearing where I’d seen Jesus praying was empty, the air spiky with shadows. I’d come early enough to perform my burial task before he appeared, stealing from the house before the sun hefted its red belly over the summit of the hills. Lavi carried the bundle of my scrolls, the clay tablet on which I’d written my curse, and a digging tool. I bore the incantation bowl beneath my coat. The thought that Jesus might return sent a shock of joy and fright through me. I couldn’t say what I would do—whether I would speak to him or slip away as I’d done before.

  I waited at the cave opening while Lavi inspected it for bandits, snakes, and other menacing creatures. Finding none, he beckoned me inside, where it was cool and gloomy, speckled with bat droppings and pieces of stoneware, a few of which I gathered. Holding my head scarf over my nose to lessen the smell of animal dung and moldering earth, I found a spot near the back of the cave, beside a column of stone that I could easily recognize when it was time to reclaim my belongings. Lavi jabbed at the ground with the digging tool, opening a gash in the dirt. Dust flew. Cobwebs floated down to make nets on my shoulders. He grunted as he worked—he was slight, unused to heavy toil, but eventually he fashioned a cavity two cubits deep and two cubits wide.

  Lifting up the flax that draped the incantation bowl, I gazed inside it at my prayer, at the sketch I’d made of myself, the gray smudge, the red thread, then placed the bowl into the hole. Beside it, I laid the bundle of scrolls, and last, the clay tablet. I wondered if I would see any of this ever again. I raked the dirt over them and spread the pebbles and bits of pottery I’d collected over the site to conceal that it’d been disturbed.

  When we emerged into the sunlight, Lavi spread his cloak on the ground and I sat looking toward the balsam grove. I drank from the wineskin in my pouch and nibbled a piece of bread. I waited past the second hour. I waited past the third.

  He did not come.

  xx.

  On the day Mother announced my betrothal ceremony would take place in thirty days, I’d sewn thirty ivory chips onto a swath of pale blue linen. Each day since, I’d cut one off. Now, alone on the roof of the house, I stared at the cloth, sobered by the meagerness of chips that remained. Eight.

  It was the twilit hour. Moroseness didn’t come easily to me—anger did, yes; passion and stubbornness, always—but sitting here, I felt bereft. I’d returned twice to Tabitha’s house but had been denied entry. Earlier today Mother had informed me that my friend had been sent to live with relatives in the village of Japha, south of Nazareth. I was certain I would never see her again.

  I was afraid I would never see Jesus again either. I saw nothing but God’s backside.

  Had it always been so? When I was five, visiting the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time, I’d attempted to follow Father and Judas up the circular steps through the Nicanor Gate, when
Mother yanked me back. Her hand clamped tight on my arm as I tried to twist free, my eyes straining after my brother, who moved toward the gleaming marble and gold gilt of the sanctuary where God lived. The Holy of Holies. She shook my shoulders to get my attention. “Under penalty of death, you can go no further.”

  I stared at the smoke plumes rising from the altar beyond the gate. “But why can’t I go, too?”

  For years, whenever I recalled her answer, it would bestow on me the same jolt of surprise I’d felt the day she’d uttered it. “Because, Ana, you are female. This is the Court of Women. We can go no further.” In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

  Taking up the snipping knife, I sliced away another ivory chip from the cloth. Seven.

  Eventually I told Yaltha about Jesus. About the colorful threads draped over his fingers in the market stall, and how, but for them, I wouldn’t know of him at all. I described the rough feel of his palm when he’d come to my aid, the sickening thud of his head on the tile when the soldier had shoved him. When I revealed how I came upon him again at the cave as he prayed the Kaddish and the exigency I felt to speak to him but stifled, she smiled. “And now he inhabits your thoughts and inflames your heart.”

  “Yes.” I didn’t add that he caused heat and light to move about in my body as well, but I felt she knew that, too.

  I could not have borne Yaltha telling me that my longing for him only came from my despair over Nathaniel. It was true that Jesus had stepped into my path at the same moment the rest of my world collapsed. I suppose he was, in part, a consolation. She must’ve known it, but she refrained from saying it. Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOOTSTEPS JARRED THE LADDER, and I turned to see Yaltha’s head pop up like a fishing bob. She was agile enough, but I feared one evening she would topple off into the courtyard. I hurried to offer her my hand, but instead of taking it, she said in a low voice, “Hurry. You must come down. Judas is here.”

  “Judas!”

  She hushed me and peered into the shadows below. Earlier, one of Antipas’s soldiers, the vicious one, had been positioned close by at the back entrance to the house. “Your brother waits for you at the mikvah,” she whispered. “Take care no one sees you.”

  I waited for her to descend, then followed, remembering Father shouting that if Judas were caught, Antipas would execute him.

  A thin blue darkness filled the courtyard. I didn’t see the soldier, but he could be anywhere about. I heard Shipra somewhere nearby cleaning the brazier. Overhead, the windows in the upper rooms of the house stared down, narrow and flickering. Yaltha thrust a clay lamp and towel at me. “May the Lord cleanse you and make you pure,” she said loudly for Shipra’s benefit, then disappeared into the house.

  I wanted to fly across the courtyard and down the steps to my brother, but I clipped the wings in my feet and walked slowly. I sang aloud the song of purification. As I descended to the mikvah, I heard the heartbeat in the cistern—drip, drip . . . drip, drip. The air in the small underground room felt thick in my throat. Lifting the lamp, I watched a skin of light form on the surface of the pool.

  I called in a quiet voice, “Judas.”

  “I’m here.”

  Turning, I saw him leaning against the wall behind me. The dark, handsome features, his quick smile. I set down the lamp and threw my arms about him. His woolen tunic smelled of sweat and horses. He was different. Thinner, browned, a new smoldering in his eyes.

  Unexpectedly, my joy was overtaken by an upwell of anger. “How could you leave me here to fend for myself? Without even saying goodbye.”

  “Little sister, you had Yaltha with you. If she’d not been here, I wouldn’t have left you. What I’m doing is larger than either of us. I’m doing this for God. For our people.”

  “Father said Antipas will put you to death! His soldiers are looking for you.”

  “What can I do, Ana? It’s the fullness of time. The Romans have occupied our land for seventy-seven years. Can’t you see how auspicious that is? Seventy-seven. That’s God’s holiest number, a sign to us the time has come.”

  Next he would tell me he was one of the two Messiahs God had promised. Judas had suffered from messianic fever since he was a boy, a condition that rose and fell according to Rome’s brutalities. It afflicted almost everyone in Galilee, though I couldn’t say I was much affected by it. The Messiahs were prophesized—I couldn’t dispute it—but did I really believe a priest Messiah of Aaron and a king Messiah of David would suddenly appear arm in arm and lead an army of angels that would save us from our oppressors and restore the throne to Israel? God could not be swayed to break a mere betrothal, and Judas would have me believe the Lord meant to defeat the might of Rome.

  There would be no dissuading my brother, though; I wouldn’t try. I walked to the edge of the pool, where his shadow floated on the water. I stood there, staring at it. Finally I said, “Much has happened since you left. They’ve betrothed me.”

  “I know. It’s why I’ve come.”

  I couldn’t think how he might’ve learned of my betrothal or why it would bring him here. Whatever the reason, it was important enough for him to risk being caught.

  “I came to warn you. Nathaniel ben Hananiah is a devil.”

  “You imperiled your life to tell me that? Do you think I don’t know what a devil he is?”

  “I don’t think you do. The steward who manages Nathaniel’s date grove is a sympathizer to our cause. He overheard certain things.”

  “The steward spies on Nathaniel for you?”

  “Listen—I must speak quickly. There’s more to your betrothal than what’s written in the contract. There is one thing Father doesn’t have, and we know it well.”

  “He owns no land,” I said.

  Most everyone has a private torment, some voracious badger that gnaws at them without ceasing, and this was Father’s. His own father had owned sizable papyrus fields in Egypt, and by law, his brother, Haran, the firstborn, should have received a double portion and he a single, but Haran, the same tormenter who had banished Yaltha to the Therapeutae, had secured a position for Father far away, here in the court of Antipas’s father, King Herod. My father was only eighteen then, too young and trusting to perceive the deceit. In his absence, Haran manipulated the law to take possession of Father’s portion, too. Just as it was with Jacob and Esau, a stolen birthright was the golden badger.

  Judas said, “Nathaniel went to him, offering a quarter measure of his estates.”

  “In exchange for me?”

  He looked down. “No, little sister; marriage to you wasn’t a thought in either of their minds then. Nathaniel wanted a seat of power within the palace and he was willing to give up large portions of his land for it. Already Father has promised him a place on the high council, where he can leverage his power for the rich and keep his tax low. If that isn’t enough, Father has pledged to rent Nathaniel’s storehouses to hold Herod Antipas’s taxes and the Roman tributes collected throughout Galilee. This will make Nathaniel the richest man in Galilee other than Antipas. And in exchange Father gets what he craves—the title that was stolen from him: landowner.”

  “What of me?”

  “It was Father who made you part of their pact. I don’t doubt our mother had been nagging him to find you a worthy betrothal, and suddenly here was Nathaniel. It must’ve seemed propitious to Father—Nathaniel had wealth and because of their arrangement, he would soon possess all the clout of the governing class.”

  Father!

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “There’s no escape from my betrothal. The contract has been signed. The bride price is paid. It can’t be ended ex
cept by divorce and I’ve tried to affront him every way I could. . . .” I stopped, realizing it would never matter how repugnantly I behaved. Because of his agreement with Father, Nathaniel would never divorce me.

  I said, “Help me, Judas. Please do something. I cannot bear this marriage.”

  He straightened. “I will give Nathaniel a reason to end the betrothal. I’ll do what I can—I swear it,” he said. “I must go. You should leave first and be sure the soldier I saw earlier is not in sight. I will leave by the gate at the back of the lower courtyard. If the way is clear, sing the song that was on your lips when you arrived.”

  “I must appear as if I’ve bathed,” I said. “Turn your back so I can disrobe and immerse myself.”

  “Quickly,” he said.

  Peeling away my tunic, I stepped into the coolness of the water, then dipped under, splintering his reflection into a thousand black drops. Hurriedly, I dabbed myself half-dry.

  “God keep you, Judas,” I said as I mounted the steps.

  I went to the house, brokenhearted and singing.

  xxi.

  One morning three days after Judas’s visit, I woke with the image of a date palm branch. Had I dreamed of it? I sat up, pillows tumbling. The frond was a twisted contortion of deformed green-black fingers.

  I couldn’t get it out of my thoughts.

  The wind began to thrash about, and I knew the rains would come soon. The ladder thumped against the roof. The cooking griddles clattered in the courtyard.

  It was early still when an urgent and relentless pounding began on the front door. Slipping from my room onto the balcony, I peered over the railing and saw Father hurrying across the reception hall. Mother stepped onto the loggia beside me. The heavy bolt on the door lifted. The cedar door groaned, and Father said, “Nathaniel, what’s all this commotion about?”